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12

Nov

2018

HSE Hosts Annual MLH Hackathon

In late October, students from the HSE School of Business Informatics organised the second Major League Hacking (MLH) hackathon hosted in Moscow. The participants of the event, which include students and alumni of Russian and foreign universities, developed IT solutions for Russian companies.

MLH hosts its events all around the world. The first time an MLH hackathon took place in Russia was last year on the initiative of HSE students. These same students were the founders of the club HSE Hackers, which was renamed Russian Hackers after the first event since students and alumni from other universities are now members as well.

A total of 1,700 applications were submitted for this year’s hackathon, with 400 individuals from 14 countries ultimately participating. This included 70 students from HSE. There were twice as many participants as last year, and this was the first time that international students participated in the event. Additionally, whereas last year’s organisers were solely students from HSE, this year they were joined by students from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Moscow State University.

The hackathon took place at the office of the company 1C, with cases being provided by nine different IT companies. The event’s sponsors were 1C, MTS, Rosbank, Sibur, REG.RU, WorldQuant, BANKEX, HERE, Cleverbots, and CoFactor.

Last year’s hackathon lasted 12 hours, while this year’s took 36 with no breaks. ‘Several members stayed awake for the entire 36 hours,’ notes Maxim Dyakov, a senior in the HSE School of Business Informatics and one of the Russian Hackers club’s organisers. ‘And some still found time to sleep a little – there was a nap area with ottomans.’

The tasks assigned during the hackathon, according to Maxim, were more serious and well thought out. As such, they required a deep dive into the subject matter. Thanks to this, the participants were able to provide the companies with new products to create, ready-made solution prototypes to test and implement into the business, and possible solutions to problems concerning digitalisation. In turn, representatives from the companies gave eight lectures for hackathon participants and discussed things like using information technology to transform a business.

A total of 89 projects were developed at the event, of which independent mentors and IT specialists selected the top 10. Each of the nine companies picked the team who solved the company’s case best, and two more winners were named in separate nominations. In total, there were 21 winning teams at the event, 12 of which had HSE students as members.

The ultimate winner of the entire hackathon was the team AIRT, whose project involved using Java Script to develop a library for voice recognition to control content on a screen. The team had two students from HSE – Alexander Markovich and Oleg Vasiliev.

As part of the Moscow International Education Fair, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev met with students who won medals at the biggest programming competition in the world. This global contest recently reached its conclusion in Portugal, and the prize winners include HSE’s Faculty of Computer Science team.

HSE students participated in Creation Lab, an annual international business hackathon, which is organized as part of the World Business Dialogue in Cologne. The forum’s partner educational, power and retail businesses will implement the best of the suggested solutions in their operations.

On December 1st and 2nd, the semifinals of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) for teams from the Northern Eurasia region were held. HSE teams from St. Petersburg (8th place) and the Moscow-based Faculty of Computer Science (13th place) received first class certificates. Furthermore, the teams will represent HSE at the finals, which will be held in Portugal next year.

Artur Davletshin, fourth-year student in Informatics and Computer Hardware and Software at MIEM HSE (supervisor Aleksandr Romanov, Associate Professor at the School of Computer Engineering) has won a scholarship for the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Artur will attend the WWDC in San Jose, California, from June 4 – 8.

HSE students recently attended Creation Lab, an international business hackathon, where they presented their projects for the international partner companies. The hackathon was organized as part of the World Business Dialogue forum.

Major League Hacking (MLH) holds its events around the world, but this year is the first time MLH Local Hack Day is taking place in Russia thanks to the initiative of students from the Higher School of Economics. Participants of the hackathon developed IT solutions for some of Russia’s largest companies.

HSE students from the Faculty of Computer Science and the Institute of Education have taken part in the ‘Put Together Your 2035 University’ hackaton. The theme of the hackaton was concerned with developing and designing AI solutions (with the use of machine learning) in education. HSE students took third place and made it through to the finals!

A team of post-graduate students and researchers from the HSE Centre for Cognition & Decision Making have invented a multiplayer BCI game, which is won by the player who best controls a robot with their mind.